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I included scholarships, awards, and graduation distinction (e.g. summa/magna/cum laude) from undergrad. If I had undergrad presentations/pubs, I would include those too. Honor societies and extra-curricular activities (such as club, sport or student politics involvement) I would not bother with. However if you were involved with organizing student conferences, that should be included under "Professional Activities".

Study the basic math concepts and do more practice questions and tests. There's no other way about it, really.

Right, studying word patterns is definitely a good strategy. There's a lot of recurring themes that they use for antonyms and analogies. The most difficult section in Verbal, I found, was reading comprehension. The sciency passages were A-OK, but the literary stuff was brutally boring (no offense) and thus hard to pay attention to the details. A lot of time was wasted re-reading those latter kinds of passages.

Phedre, I agree with your comments. Substance is certainly more important than page length.

It depends on which test prep software you are using. PowerPrep was basically bang on for me. However, it seemed like the commercially available prep tests are harder on the Q (I scored 100 points lower on these than I did on the actual thing). I used the Princeton Review 400ish high frequency, high difficulty word list. Studied the vocab for an hour or two each day and did practice test/question sets each day for 2 months and brought up the V score by 200 points. I highly recommend that book (Word Power, I think it was called) if you are short on studying time. Otherwise, use the Barron 4000+ word list.

hi mims, thanks for your response! I agree, simple attendance is not enough to list on a CV. I changed the thread title to be more general so I can keep asking questions that I and others may have about, I guess, "professionalism" rather than opening up new threads. My next question is about memberships in professional societies/organizations. I apologize in advance as this is another one of my "is it CV worthy?" questions (CV is all too important and I don't want to miss anything to include but I also don't want to give off this desparate-to-extend-CV-length vibe to future employers, grant committees, etc.). Anyway, are there any merits in joining these societies besides the obvious discounts for conference registration and/or journal sent to your address? Again, I observed that some academics have a HUGE list of memberships to these professional groups. Some of these are obviously subscription based (e.g. you pay a fee and you're in) while some are by induction (?-not sure about details, but I'm guessing a panel reviews your membership application. So it's more or less a peer-reviewed process for admission). Of course the latter sounds more impressive and is prestigious to a certain extent. However, why bother listing all the other fee-based memberships? To fill up space on the CV? Doesn't it look bad if you only have fee-based memberships? tl;dr: I would love to read your opinions about professional memberships be it fee-based or "peer-reviewed". For the former, are they worth the money and are they CVeable? Thanks.

You do have a good point. The risk of applying is that you are giving out a lot of personal information to questionable hands. But then again, I might be excessively worrying about it. If anyone else planning to apply, do not include the $8 fee; you will find the same information that they provide available for free in the public domain (check out the blog site I posted above).

Curious to know: does workshop participation have a place in CVs? My hunch points to no (because you are just attending), but I have seen professional CVs with them. It does make sense as a form of continuing education/professional development type of thing, but I'm not sure it's CV worthy. Any thoughts on this issue?

You best be trolling, tough guy.

Before you worry about getting funded at "highest ranked" programs, do you think you have a good shot at gaining admission? One step at a time, bro.

Their cheap looking website certainly does not boost their credibility. What's with the: "Scholarships Preservation Funding Research Funding Project Funding" menu that don't have links??? Funding my ass, lol. Any investigative journalists that lurk this forum want to dig up some dirt on this so called benevolent organization?

So what is your advice to future applicants? Don't play by the rules? While you are opening up confidential LORs, why not also make up some extra-curricular activities to put on your CV? You know the selection committee will never confirm whether or not you performed them. You types are truly pathetic.

Hi ridgey, thanks for your response! I have access to all these databases, but I need to justify the databases I use for my searches in my thesis and it was difficult finding information about the overlap. However, recently I asked the local medical science librarian and apparently the difference between Embase and scopus and PubMed is that it has more European content, but otherwise there's a lot of overlap. I guess I will go with all three of these databases.

Posting in thread to increase my post count.

Out of curiousity: has anyone on here ever applied to or heard of the John Gyles Education Award? This award is plastered everywhere on university financial aid department websites, but after reading information from a blog, this seems like a money making scheme. http://www.johngyleseducationcenter.com/ Blog post & comments: http://oursesame.blogspot.com/2007/06/j ... award.html What do you guys think of this?